During a recent short-lived foray into shift work, I asked a co-worker how I was supposed to get in the half hour break I was entitled to, when there was really no time to take even a toilet break during the eight hour shift. Her laconic reply: “Don’t you smoke?”
Those three words taught me, as someone woefully unfamiliar with the toll of shift work on body and psyche, that the harried smokers outside of restaurants and bakeries aren’t as much addicts as they are escapees. And I learned too, that as a non-smoker I had no good excuse for taking a break. Sore feet are somehow harder to admit to than an addiction to cigarettes. I smoked for about a year, when I was a student, and I did so for the romance of it. I was in love with my French boyfriend, with his dreams of flying and the blue smoke of his Gitanes. I was in love with Latin American literature, and smoked sitting on the floor of our shared room, hammering out my Masters thesis on a typewriter. A few years ago I wrote a song I called “Through the smoke”, recorded it at Love Studios in Seattle, and then promptly forgot about it. As I listen to it again now, I think I must then have felt that time slip away, a time when there was no such thing as too much wine, too much coffee or too many cigarettes. When vice was romance and there were no consequences. I’m profoundly grateful I got to live in that time. It doesn’t really seem that long ago. (Photo credit Hossam M. Omar)
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A little about myself:Hello there and thank you for visiting my website! I have lived in Spain, Mexico, France and the United States, but now make my home in Germany. I have a Ph.D. in Literary Studies and a Master's in TESOL, and have published several books for children, among them El Loro Tico Tango and El Fandango de Lola, a 2012 Ezra Jack Keats Honor Book. As a writer and an artist I'm in constant conversation with my own anxious mind even as I celebrate the joyful possibilities of our crazy, incomprehensible world. Archives
November 2020
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